The Beau Monde Mall in suburban Denver was one of those shopping centers tailor-made for the "shop-till-you-drop" 1980s. Outfitted with rustic tile floors, wide brick arches and black wrought-iron lampposts to resemble a quaint European village, the $34-million center had grandiose plans to offer residents of its tony neighborhood an assortment of fancy boutiques and fine restaurants. But then the bottom fell out of the Denver economy, and the mall never filled.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed Wednesday to weaken a series of rules to protect wetlands, including a requirement that developers create or restore a wetland for every one they destroy through building. The proposals were part of an effort by the corps to loosen rules they set last year--with the prodding of Clinton administration officials--to better safeguard wetlands as required by the Clean Water Act.

As door-to-door sales pitches go, this one was a little odd. There was no demand for money; there was not even any merchandise for sale. What the man at the front door wanted to know was if anybody would mind if he uprooted and hauled off the giant palm tree in the front yard. The palm shot up toward the sky like a giant totem pole, dwarfing the one-story house. Its sticky, inedible little fruit showered the lawn.

Southern California's long-range transportation plan may violate clean air laws, a problem that jeopardizes billions in public funds for highway and other projects. The Federal Highway Administration, Caltrans, California Air Resources Board and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have put regional planners on notice that there are serious flaws in the recently adopted plan. One problem cited repeatedly in formal letters to the Southern California Assn.

Southern Californians have gotten used to living--and building--on the fault line. Scores of faults, active and inactive, crisscross the region. Though their threat is deadly, that potential has not done much to limit growth and development--until recent years. A little-known state law that forbids buildings "for human occupancy" in an active fault zone recently has shaken up Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego county agencies.

Kathy Jenks gets many calls in the course of a day, and some of them are shaggy-bear stories. Jenks is the Camarillo-based director of Ventura County's Department of Animal Regulation. And what has been happening in most other Southern California counties has happened in Ventura: more and more wild animals wandering into suburban neighborhoods. The encounters make for frantic calls to Jenks' department. But one call stands out. "It was from my 75-year-old mother, who lives in Ojai," Jenks said.

Southern California's largest water agency has annexed thousands of acres of mostly dry hillside into its six-county service area and agreed to supply water to tens of thousands of new homes and businesses--even as its water supplies have dwindled during five years of drought.

At a meeting last week of 150 high-tech entrepreneurs of the Digital Coast Roundtable and again at last weekend's giant Global Cities conference at UCLA--with 400 delegates from 35 nations in attendance--Mayor Richard Riordan declared Los Angeles to be "the capital of the 21st century." Reactions were revealing. The entrepreneurs, with some qualifications, accepted the rallying cry.

Driving along the freshly paved streets in this city's newest planned communities, you can be excused for feeling slightly claustrophobic. That's because many of the gently curving streets on the edges of a dense orange grove are as much as 30% narrower than the standard 36-foot-wide residential road. The design is seen by developers and city planners as a way to create more tightknit and attractive communities.

Slow-growth leaders from five Southern California counties on Saturday announced formation of a new regional organization--The Southern California Coalition for Responsible Controlled Growth--to oppose elected officials who are pro-development and to "protect the initiative process."

Researchers from USC and the Brookings Institution think tank will issue a report today urging Southern California community leaders to combat the problems of sprawl by developing coordinated regional growth policies. Among other things, the report calls for efforts to encourage home building and job creation in the region's aging communities, where many poor and low-income workers are concentrated.

In a fight over how much future housing will be needed in Southern California, a regional planning panel voted Thursday to reject a state-imposed plan to accommodate the 2 million new residents expected in the area over the next five years. The state mandated that six Southern California counties plan for the construction of more than 504,000 new housing units by 2005. But the Southern California Assn.

In a move that could dramatically affect development in Southern California, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced that more than 500,000 acres of prime real estate is critical habitat for the tiny gnatcatcher bird and the San Diego fairy shrimp. The ruling means major developers and road builders from Los Angeles to the Mexican border, including Orange County's Transportation Corridor Agencies and Rancho Mission Viejo Co.

A regional office of a federal wildlife agency that oversees development in six Southern California counties has a heavy workload and poor system of record-keeping that may be responsible for permit delays, an audit released Thursday found. The Carlsbad office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also has a high staff turnover, which may add to the time it takes the agency to evaluate a project and ensure it doesn't harm endangered or threatened species, according to the report by U.S.

September 9, 2000 | ANNETTE KONDO and JENIFER RAGLAND, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

In a move that could affect major planned developments in Southern California, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday proposed designating 5.4 million acres throughout the state as critical habitat for the threatened California red-legged frog. The habitat would be the state's largest, and among the nation's biggest, for a threatened species. The government has designated 6.8 million acres as habitat critical to the northern spotted owl in Washington, Oregon and Northern California.

Nearly 500,000 acres in California will be proposed as critical habitat for the endangered Southwestern arroyo toad by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday. The move could affect some of the most prominent development projects in the region, including the massive Newhall Ranch development, which would straddle the Santa Clara River in Los Angeles County, and the proposed 16-mile Foothill South toll road in southern Orange County.

Southland developers, who vastly overbuilt office space in the region during the cash-easy 1980s, are in danger of doing it again, a prominent real estate analyst warned. All the businesses from Ventura County to San Diego combined will only need 2 million square feet of newly built space per year for the next decade, said economist and demographer David Birch of Cambridge, Mass.-based Cognetics Inc. That's a fraction of the amount of office space planned or under construction.

In the movie "Defending Your Life," the protagonist played by Albert Brooks has died and gone to a place called Judgment City. But even in the afterlife, there is one facet of his life in Los Angeles that Brooks can't escape: the mini-mall. "Six of them just opened outside of town," a cheery Judgment City functionary tells the bewildered Brooks. "Personally, I don't think I would use them because I don't like yogurt and I love doing my own nails."

Growing businesses in Los Angeles and Orange counties are filling new office buildings pretty much as fast as they are being constructed, suggesting that developers and lenders in this real estate cycle are doing a more prudent job of matching supply with demand than they did in the now-infamous overbuilding debacle of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nearly 30% of the speculative office space that was built in L.A.

Caltrans' promise to a toll road operator not to make safety improvements to the Riverside Freeway--lest it hurt the operator's business--is similar to agreements with two other would-be developers of toll roads in Orange and San Diego counties, documents show. In both cases, the state agreed not to improve or extend major thoroughfares for 35 years after the nearby toll roads open.